Clare Townhill

Internet of the Afterlife

What does it mean when the internet is not just real but is also an icon, and a symbol? Five thought provoking global stories of the internet as a place you drive to, asynchronous occasion, as an intermediate destination without keyboard, interface or electricty, that comes to you, the internet as an imagined space and last but not least the internet as an offering to the afterlife. Wonderful.

The Internet is Primarily a Content Platform

Really important chart from Silicon Alley - content has become king.

Guardian API

Nice new toys to play with from The Guardian. Good talk on this by Simon Williams at BarCamp6. Alas falling down a deep dark pitch hole means I'm a bit tardy with posting the details. The API was launched at the beginning of March and currently has two components:

1. The Content API is a mechanism for getting Guardian content. You can query our content database for articles and get them back in formats that are geared toward integration with other internet applications.

2. The Data Store is a collection of important and high quality data sets curated by Guardian journalists. You can find useful data here, download it, and integrate it with other internet applications.

The Data Store is just genius, enables some great uses and insight via blogs like Ouseful and bawdy yet no less interesting guest posts like this:

'Towards the end of last week, a sleepness night led me to indulge a childish sense of humour with 15 minutes of tomfoolery, the output of which was a graph comparing the decline and fall of various swear-words in the pages of the Guardian over the last decade. In a bid to retain some sense of self-respect, I'll for now ignore the fact that this graph has achieved a readership that dwarfs anything else I've written in my career to date, and focus instead on how I did it.'

The Guardian Open Platform

A World Drowned In Music

The video above is footage from a working application (under development) created by Paul Lamere’s team at Sun Labs in Massachusetts (The AURA Project). I'd love to see more musical experience interfaces MEIs: an ability to swim or haptically feel our way through the music we own making the phrase 'drowning in music' a pleasurably immersive user experience rather than a feeling of being overwhelmed by seemingly limitless linear lists.

Feel The Noise

I should warn you straight out and say that this is more of a rambling muse than a tidy linear post. If you're ok with that then please continue, if not seek coherence elsewhere. This project from the Behance Network crystallized something I've been thinking about a lot this week. Noise. I've been working all week in Amsterdam. Lovely, quiet Amsterdam. The precedence given to pedal power not only removes cars from the roads it also allows the sounds of humanity to flourish: laughter, conversation, coughs, gentle self-reflexive wonderings. The sheer tyranny of noise in London negates al but the most forceful and aggressive voices. Neurotic buses treat us like amnesiac goldfish: constantly reminding us which bus we're on and where we are. I've also been thinking about visual noise - I'm working on a brief for Russia and the CIS, the media equivalent of a neon migraine, and how it compares to the wonderful yet eerie empty billboard sites in Sao Paolo. The comments that sit alongside Flickr group shots of the sites use adjectives like 'clean' 'peace' and 'beauty'. Over-exposure to noise, or rather people's desire for quiet is the largest challenge that traditional advertising industry will have in the future. In a world where the consumer can completely control all of the information they want to see, traditional advertising just doesn't work. New technologies are bringer us closer and closer to this. It's a when not an if, and the when is soon:

   

The UK's Digital Obsession

Our digital addiction: 727 hours surfing, 27 phoning and 972 texts
We love camera phones, digital TVs and recorders more than anyone else

'In the heyday of rock music, no stadium gig was complete without a slow number that prompted the crowd to hold aloft their cigarette lighters to create hundreds of flickering points of light. Now the same effect is created by hundreds of people holding up their mobile phones as the audience takes photo after photo to prove they were there.'

Here's the Guardian's opening paragraph on the results of Ofcom's International Communications Audit. Findings reveal that this 'digital-lighter' effect is more likely to occur amongst a British crowd than amongst any other nation. We use our phones as cameras more than any other nation in the world, including Japan.

Here's a link to the key points.

(The picture was taken by me last Thursday at a gig; the little blue lights towards the bottom of the image are digital-lighters/camera-phones)

Chart Topper

Spend on web advertising topped 21 billion dollars last year. Full report from the IAB here.

Good to Know

Not the most inspiring of subjects but damn useful for those for whom web stats matter:

Did your site's Alexa ranking change overnight? That's because on Thursday, the chart-friendly Web analytics company announced an overhaul of its rankings system.

Alexa, according to a company announcement, now "aggregate(s) data from multiple sources" rather than just the surfing habits of those who'd installed its browser toolbar.

"Alexa toolbar users' interests and surfing habits could differ from those of the general population in a number of ways, and we described some of those possible differences on our Web site," the announcement explained.

The rest of the article plus whys and wherefores here

The Cart Whisperer

Five happy minutes in an otherwise dreary morning. This caught my on on the homepage of Technorati, the video intrigued me (a rarer and rarer thing these days). Throwing caution to the wind I clicked and happily landed here at nomoreabandonnedcarts.com the home of Fillibert Liberty, Cart Whisperer and crusader to end the phenomenon of the shopping cart deserted midtransaction. I like this, a lot. I've definitely been known to hit and run on occasion. Making the online cart analogous to a real trolley filled with goods that you just walk away from (and implicitly the effect on the trader) is a very clever bit of thinking. It  goes to the heart of consumer concerns over the safety of their finances and downright fatigue of entering, and re-entering personal details, inventing usernames and passwords, billing addresses, delivery addresses and then worrying about who exactly gets to see them.  The site's 'sponsor' is Verisign. This article from NewScientist about Web 3.0 is a good complementary read.